When The Search Bar Fails You.

The pace of change in the world is accelerating at an ever-faster rate. We all know this.

Traditional careers are being rapidly disrupted. We know that too.

You should “Plan for Five Careers in a Lifetime”. Yup. We read that article too.

But what’s missing from the vague pronouncements of Silicon Valley CEOs and futurists is any specific guidance on how we as individuals can manage our own personal evolution.

I’ve spent many years researching career transitions, mid-life epiphanies and personal meaning. I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of anyone offering personalised support at such a crucial time of life. The result is Personal Best NYC.

But I don’t know what I want to do?

You know you want more growth but you don’t know much more than that. That’s perfectly normal. Most of us have been on one path since graduation. Often it’s one prescribed for us by someone else.

Then comes a crossroads. It can run the gamut from a nagging itch to a full-blown existential crisis, but the net result is an increasing sense of certainty that you’re not in the right place. When your life is out of integrity it’s like driving with the parking brake on; you can do it, but you’ll burn-out eventually.

What do you do next? Trying to think our way to our ‘calling’ alone can actually paralyze us into inaction; you risk endless ruminative introspection. A critical part of the problem is that the answers may not be found online. Picasso said: ‘Computers are useless. They can only give you answers’. It’s a rare and unsettling feeling that we can’t just find the right answer immediately, but futures aren’t like facts. Google can’t help you plan your unique personal reinvention if you don’t even know what to type in the search bar.

If technology can’t help, the best path is a personalized 1-on-1 relationship with an experienced coach. Coaches are paid to listen, and good coaches are expert listeners. They can ask the kind of questions that reflect truths you haven’t even considered, and pull out information you simply can’t elicit alone. The idea that apps or algorithms can replace a trained professional human is simply ludicrous: it insults the uniqueness of each of us.

Coaching is about much more than advice. One of my all-time favourite passages is from an article in N+1 on Silicon Valley ‘venture capitalists have spearheaded massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice.’

Put simply, advice is incredibly poor at eliciting behaviour change, and coaching is very good at it. It’s like the movie Inception; people don’t change unless the idea comes from within them. But coaching brings it to the surface. It may sound a bit strange, but the coaching relationship really does do the work. Moreover, the idea that you will be held accountable and that you have another set of eyes on your goals is powerful stuff.

Finally, if our answers our uniquely personal, the solution requires getting in touch with our selves in a more intimate way than we might be used to. I have attended training courses for CTI Coaching, iRest Meditation and Existential Humanistic Therapy. In all three the common skillset was helping people connect with their bodies and emotions in the here-and-now. Too many of us live in our heads, shut off from signals our body is desperately trying to deliver. The key is to be able to ask yourself ‘how am I presently living, and how am I willing to live?’. You can’t tell how you’re living presently without a keen awareness of your state in the moment. And you can’t wish your goals into action if you aren’t connected with your emotions in the first place. As Irving Yalom puts it in Existential Psychotherapy:

‘One’s capacity to wish is automatically facilitated if one is helped to feel. Wishing requires feeling. If one’s wishes are based on something other than feelings-for example, on rational deliberation or moral imperatives-then they are no longer wishes but “shoulds” or “oughts,” and one is blocked from communicating with one’s real self.’

The trained coach reflects emotions and centers the client in such a way that they can truly understand where they are and what they want. No Google search, job site or personality test can do that.

So…. try it out. The first 45min session is free and can be booked directly on the site.

Follow me on Twitter @personalbestnyc